Founder of 'Values-Free' Education "Owes Parents an Apology"

By William R. Coulson, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
U.S. International University
Reprinted from: AFA Journal, 4/89

Twenty years ago as I write, in 1967 and '68, I helped organize a project to test the effect of what has since come to be called "affective" and sometimes, by critics, "value-free" education. The project was operated out of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla and funded by the R.J. Reynolds family through the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. Reynolds, of course, is the nation's largest cigarette manufacturing company. Carl Rogers was principal investigator. I was research coordinator. Later we gave up the idea, which I saw as preemptive and Rogers as unworkable. R.J. Reynolds, however, continues to participate through tobacco institute sponsorship of a multi-million-dollar program called Helping Youth Decide, and by independently helping fund an organization called Quest International. Quest conducts affective education programs for school children in 50 states.

Our experiment was conducted in schools run by the Immaculate Heart order of nuns on the West Coast. The system consisted of a college, two high schools and 57 elementary schools. The standard that was suspended on our arrival was the standard of reason: the proposed replacement was the standard of feelings.

The abandonment of reason in an academic setting, especially a college, is not a felicitous proposal. Eventually faculty realized that it involved subverting their own traditions in favor of ours. But by then we'd attained an advantage. In being asked to speak the language of feelings, faculty couldn't keep pace with the newcomers from La Jolla; we'd had long years of practice at surfacing and reflecting feelings. So initially, from students and at least some of the faculty, there was praise for our sensitivity and skill in picking up meanings only tentatively expressed, and it seemed the Immaculate Heart schools might become the feeling-centered institutions we'd claimed would be 'fantastic.' But an increasing number of faculty were becoming uneasy, suspecting they'd been led to collaborate with an enemy, an enemy with little interest in perpetuating their traditions of mindfulness.

It may not have been clear to them at first how psychotherapeutic our philosophy was. In an interview in 1976, long after it might have provided warning, Carl Rogers confessed our intention: it had been our plan early on, and years later was still the hope of Rogers as the most determined member of our team, to invert the relative importance of ideas and emotions in classrooms all over the world. He told the interviewer, "I think the emphasis on the rational mind is greatly misplaced. To isolate his thinking apparatus as though that was the man, I think that just disregards an enormous amount of his feelings, his physiological reactions, his genetic makeup, etc."

But of course it's not possible to express such thoughts on the futility of thought -"I think that thinking is overrated"- without falling into contradiction; and seeing the transcript of the 1976 interview, a staff member said that while he hadn't yet picked up on the totalitarian potential of the project's philosophy, not explicitly, he'd probably shared some of the uneasiness of the resident faculty at the time. By 1968, the second year of the project, he said, he'd begun to suspect that he and his colleagues hadn't been playing fair.

We didn't think rationality and argumentation deserved the emphasis academics usually give them; we thought the exploration of feelings is a more complete process and inherently more democratic. Everybody has feelings. No one can say you don't feel what you know you do feel. But they can say your ideas are wrong. So we wanted the schools to focus more on feelings, and we didn't want to get in an argument about it; arguing was what we thought had been overdone.

Our approach became to be empathic when anyone took issue with us. We'd say things like, "I can see that you feel strongly about that." Sometimes this made them feel better and sometimes it made them feel worse. When it was worse, it seemed to be because they thought they really couldn't get our attention; We kept acting like psychologists. That was one problem. The other was our attitude about thinking. We must have sounded like we believed our thinking had value, but not theirs. When a faculty critic asked me what was the difference between us and the pig- commissars in Animal Farm -"all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others"- I didn't have a good answer. I said, "I can see there's a lot of meaning for you in that question," and hoped he'd give up.

Such hesitation was rare on the part of the staff, and not yet a major problem among faculty. School personnel who later became opponents of the new, affective, value-free movement in education - our own version being called the "person-centered approach," - were not yet aware that the project proposed to cancel the very profession they'd trained for. They didn't know just how irrelevant we held the work of "professing" to be. Many had enterededucation for a time- honored purpose, to initiate youth into the life of the mind. They didn't realize that our philosophy questioned those very notions, initiation and mind.

Traditionally, educators have believed that responsible adults possess necessary knowledge. Young people who fail to listen, who fail to receive and appreciate this knowledge, become vulnerable to exploitation and finally lose their freedom. But our person-centered vision of classrooms characterized by facilitative, non-judgmental value- free and therapeutic commitments held no brief for traditional educational ideals.

What I implied earlier should now be confirmed: the cooperating school system collapsed. There are no more Immaculate Heart schools. TMP was the cause: Too Much Psychology. Too Many Psychotherapists. It's distressing to see that TMP has since become the hallmark of Quest; Helping Youth Decide; Here's Looking at You; Me-ology; Project Charlie; Ombudsman; DECIDE; and dozens more of similar origin - and to see the tobacco industry once again backing the movement.

Carl Rogers died last year. He and I and our project teammates owe the nation's parents an apology, for we alerted industry leaders of the potential for profit that lies in affective education. The Surgeon General has pointed out that a healthy tobacco industry depends on getting kids to experiment with cigarettes: millions of replacements are needed each year for smokers who die or quit, and adults are no longer willing to start. Affective education turns kids into starters. The research is clear and consistent on this, with numerous studies yielding the same result: getting facilitation instead of teaching causes students to become more interested in making decisions than in doing what's right. Right becomes whatever they decide.

The bad effects don't end with smoking. Youthful experimentation with sex, alcohol, marijuana and a variety of other drugs - whatever is popular at the time - has been shown to follow affective, value-free education quite predictably; we now know that after these classes students become more prone to give in to temptations than if they'd never been enrolled.

One cause lies in an educational philosophy that calls on students and teachers alike to disbelieve in the concept of temptation. Moral absolutes are routed in affective education, in favor of a psychotherapeutic imperative called "running the risks of personal growth," and this turns out to be identical with what dealers in dangerous substances and ideologies applaud. The idea of free choice for children suits them fine.

So it turns out to be a deadly scheme we hatched those twenty years ago.

Return to Home Page